Flying Fish 2015-1

Whales put on a show for us outside Aasiaat out to Aasiaat in early July. I had arrived earlier to prepare things, which was just as well as there was some damage from having had to leave Dodo’s Delight to over-winter afloat, but it was reasonably easy to repair. We set off for the Uummannaq area three or four days later, enjoying a spectacular display from a pod of whales just outside Aasiaat and squeezing past the two hidden underwater rocks in the channel into Kronsprinsen Ejland in Disko Bay for the night on the way.

The following day, perhaps emboldened by this, the skipper went the wrong side of the rock in the channel into Fortune Bay on Disko Island, but with some difficulty we managed to turn round when we started bouncing on the rocks below, and so passed the correct side. A day or so later, making up the northwest corner of Nugssuaq, we were fighting on the engine against a strong easterly wind in thick mist. Not enjoying it, I studied the chart-plotter and took the boat towards a possible indentation on the coastline.

Remarkably, we suddenly broke out into calm water and sunshine shielded by this feeble looking indentation, with the mist and wind still visibly raging past outside.

We made our way to the village of Ikerasak, to the southeast of Uummannaq. Here we were accosted by Jack-in-the-Box, as he introduced himself, who told us how in 1986 he had met aliens from outer space, and whose forte was to draw maps on large pieces of brown paper showing where he had met them and where they lived now under the ice, especially ‘the women’. The problem was, he really believed it.

If that was akin to the miraculous, try this one: there was a lot of ice in the fjord by Ikerasak, fortunately mainly towards the other side. But at anchor one day a large ice floe or bergy bit came and grounded over our anchor. If I can chop some bits off this floe, I thought, it may lighten it sufficiently to float it off and get our anchor back. So I took an old hand axe I had found abandoned in an Inuit campsite – it is not in their culture to tidy up or preserve things at all – and chopped away at an overhanging extrusion. A pleasing lump fell off, submerged and plopped up again. I chopped again with the same result. “I think I would move away now, Bob, it’s beginning to tilt”. One more hasty chop, and then a huge round ball of ice shot up from the depths right in front of me, nearly capsizing the dinghy with me in it, and at that moment the whole ice-floe exploded with a huge bang, shattering into a thousand bits. “He is like Moses, after all”, shouted Sean, (a reference to a joke about the Reverend parting the icebergs on previous climbing cruises). I rowed back to the boat, somewhat shaken, but we had got our anchor back.

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